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五月雨Samidare

Developer

Publisher

Released

Genre

Gameplay

Single-player story mode

Platforms

Windows 98/ME/2000/XP

Requirements

1.5GHz CPU, 256MB RAM, 32MB VRAM, DirectX 7

Samidare (五月雨, romanized Samidare, meaning Early Summer Rain) is a shooting game from Amusement Makers / Project Blank(P.N.B) (RebRank). It is a danmaku game with shields and is perhaps Amusement Makers' most well-known work in the West. As a RebRank game, it is neither a Touhou game, nor a Seihou game. However, it pays homage to both with elements such as the in-game history and the extra stage.

Samidare takes place on and around the Earth in the 30th century.

Contents

Gameplay

Samidare is essentially a danmaku shooting game, though the dodging element of gameplay is slightly de-emphasized. This is due in part to the existence of a shield gameplay mechanism, which players can also use to unleash "hyper" attacks. While the player pilots different units in the main story mode and the extra stage, there is no significant change in gameplay.

Story

In 2785, full-scale war breaks out on Earth over the various nations' rights to extraplanetary resources. This war ravages the Earth's environment, forcing humanity to flee underground. It also sees the creation of the M.R.S. (Machine manufacture Research and development System), an automated manufacturing and battle system designed to allow wars to take place without actual human participation. Unfortunately, within five years of humanity's flight underground, M.R.S. has completely taken control of the Earth's surface, and the first exploratory group from humanity's underground Shelters is annihilated.

Not long after this first exploratory mission, the M.R.S. system discovers the Absolute Dimensional Barrier technology and eventually refines it into the Dimensional Absolute Barrier Shield; it uses its SMD series of warplanes to test and perfect the system. Unfortunately, the prototype unit, SMD-00x, disappears after activating the barrier for the first time, and though M.R.S. is eventually able to establish contact with the dimensional void into which SMD-00x disappeared, it's never actually able to find the ship again. Nevertheless, the system continues developing the SMD series, creating smaller, more capable craft such as the SMD-24-0x "Samidare", which is piloted by a humanoid control unit, C-22, and the final unit, SMD-31-FX "Gesshoku", whose control unit, C-23, possesses an advanced, self-aware AI.

Meanwhile, humanity is busy urbanizing its Shelters, developing bipedal robots (armed lightweight walking vehicles, or ALWVs), and preparing to take the fight to M.R.S. Sixty years after the cataclysm that drove humanity underground, it finally emerges to retake the surface. By this time, M.R.S. has developed significant internal defects, and the battle is relatively short. Within two decades, almost all M.R.S.-created automata on the surface have been destroyed.

Samidare's main story mode follows the major missions of SMD-24-0x: its testing against the biomechanical construct Sylphid, its encounter with Anareta, the defense system of long-ruined space outpost Tetra-Biblos, and its encounter with the SMD series prototype, SMD-00x. The extra mode follows a flight of the SMD-31-FX several decades later, after SMD-24-0x makes it back to Earth (if you get the good ending).